Blogs

Are you ready for the cloud? Let performance profiling make the call

By Len Rosenthal, Chief Marketing Officer

Migrating certain application workloads to the cloud can offer a host of benefits for enterprise IT teams. There’s no doubt that it helps plan for disaster scenarios, increases cost efficiency and helps companies keep pace with the changing storage industry. However, some roadblocks continue to stand between many organizations and the cloud.

We often hear from companies that a main reason they’re worried about heading to the cloud is maintaining performance once their data and workloads get there. It’s a valid concern, and one that has to be investigated before migrating important business applications. One way to mitigate this concern is through workload analysis and performance profiling.

Understand the performance profiles of your workloads

You’ll often hear performance profiling referred to as performance corners testing or multi-dimensional benchmarking, but regardless of the term, the goal remains the same: to determine how a storage system performs under different workload conditions and worst-case loading scenarios.

Performance profiling solutions can provide a map showing how the workload will behave before IT teams decide what to migrate to the cloud. As a result, a company can figure out where potential bottlenecks exist or what makes the most sense for an off-premise environment.

Our Load DynamiX Enterprise solution lets users test any of the attributes – load profile, read/write ratio, command mix, etc. – exposed by its workload models. This can also be used to test with literally hundreds or even thousands of workload configurations.

What profiles perform best with the cloud?

As you can imagine, this workload analysis generates quite a bit of data and more importantly, critical insights, so companies have the confidence they need to migrate certain workloads to the cloud. IT can then determine the tier of storage that works best for each workload, including cloud options. We call this “cloud readiness”, a methodology to determine which application workloads are truly ready to be deployed in the cloud.

With performance profiling, companies don’t need to make an educated guess as to which workloads work for the cloud and which don’t. Instead, they can use actual data from rigorous tests to prove what should and should not be moved. This eliminates the fear and uncertainty many companies feel when considering a move to the cloud, enabling them to benefit from all it has to offer.